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Thursday, December 15, 2011

Arpaio's office commited civil rights violations on Hispanics

By JACQUES BILLEAUD, ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHOENIX -- The federal government
issued a scathing report Thursday that outlines how Maricopa County Sheriff Joe
Arpaio's office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against
Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and
carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen
complaints.

The report, obtained by The
Associated Press ahead of its release, is a result of the U.S. Justice
Department's three-year investigation of Arpaio's office amid complaints of
racial profiling and a culture of bias at the agency's top level.

The Justice Department's conclusions in the civil probe mark
the federal government's harshest rebuke of a national political fixture who
has risen to prominence for his immigration crackdowns and became coveted
endorsement among candidates in the GOP presidential field.

Apart from the civil rights probe,
a federal grand jury also has been investigating Arpaio's office on criminal abuse-of-power
allegations since at least December 2009 and is specifically examining the
investigative work of the sheriff's anti-public corruption squad.

The civil rights report said federal authorities will
continue to investigate complaints of deputies using excessive force against
Latinos, whether the sheriff's office failed to provide adequately police
services in Hispanic communities and a large number of sex-crimes cases that
were assigned to the agency but weren't followed up on or investigated at all.

The report took the sheriff's office to task for launching
immigration patrols, known as "sweeps," based on complaints that
Latinos were merely gathering near a business without committing crimes.
Federal authorities single out Arpaio himself and said his office, known as
MCSO, has no clear policies to guard against the violations, even after he
changed some of his top aides earlier this year.

"Arpaio's own actions have
helped nurture MCSO's culture of bias," wrote Thomas Perez, who heads the
Justice Department's civil rights division, adding that the sheriff frequently
gave such racially charged letters to some of his top aides and saved them in
his own files.

"MCSO is broken in a number of
critical respects. The problems are deeply rooted in MCSO's culture," he
said Thursday.

The Justice Department's expert on
measuring racial profiling said it's the most egregious case of racial
profiling in the nation that he has seen or reviewed in professional
literature, Perez said.

Investigators interviewed more than
400 people, including Arpaio, reviewed thousands of documents and toured county
jails as part of its probe, he said.

If the
sheriff's office doesn't turn around its policies and practices, the federal
government could pull millions of dollars of federal funding.

Arpaio's office did not immediately
respond to AP requests for comment.

The report will require Arpaio to
set up effective policies against discrimination, improve training and make
other changes that would be monitored for compliance by a judge. Arpaio faces a
Jan. 4 deadline for saying whether he wants to work out an agreement. If not,
the federal government will sue him and let a judge decide the complaint.

Arpaio, the self-proclaimed
toughest sheriff in America, has long denied the racial profiling allegation,
saying people are stopped if deputies have probable cause to believe they have
committed crimes and that deputies later find many of them are undocumented
immigrants.

Arpaio has built his reputation on
jailing inmates in tents and dressing them in pink underwear, selling himself
to voters as unceasingly tough on crime and pushing the bounds of how far local
police can go to confront illegal immigration.

The report also said he and some
top staffers tried to silence people who have spoken out against the sheriff's
office by arresting people without cause, filing meritless lawsuits against
opponents and starting investigations of critics.

One example cited by the Justice
Department is former top Arpaio aide David Hendershott, who filed bar
complaints against attorneys critical of the agency along with bringing
judicial complaints against judges who were at odds with the sheriff. All
complaints were dismissed.

The anti-corruption squad's cases
against two county officials and a judge collapsed in court before going to
trial and have been criticized by politicians at odds with the sheriff as
trumped up. Arpaio has defended the investigations as a valid attempt at
rooting out corruption in county government.

The civil rights report said
Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be stopped in traffic stops in
Maricopa County than non-Latinos and that the agency's immigration policies
treat Latinos as if they are all in the country without documents. Deputies on
the immigrant-smuggling squad stop and arrest Latino drivers without good
cause, the investigation found.

A review done as part of the
investigation found that 20 percent of traffic reports handled by Arpaio's
immigrant-smuggling squad from March 2006 to March 2009 were stops – almost all
involving Latino drivers – that were done without reasonable suspicion. The
squad's stops rarely led to smuggling arrests.

Deputies are encouraged to make
high-volume traffic stops in targeted locations. There were Latinos who were in
the U.S. legally who were arrested or detained without cause during the sweeps,
according to the report.

During the sweeps, deputies flood
an area of a city – in some cases, heavily Latino areas – over several days to
seek out traffic violators and arrest other offenders. Undocumented immigrants
accounted for 57 percent of the 1,500 people arrested in the 20 sweeps
conducted by his office since January 2008, according to figures provided by
Arpaio's office.

Police supervisors, including at
least one smuggling-squad supervisor, often used county accounts to send emails
that demeaned Latinos to fellow sheriff's managers, deputies and volunteers in
the sheriff's posse. One such email had a photo of a mock driver's license for
a fictional state called "Mexifornia."

The report said that the sheriff's
office launched an immigration operation two weeks after the sheriff received a
letter in August 2009 letter about a person's dismay over employees of a
McDonald's in the Phoenix suburb of Sun City who didn't speak English. The tip
laid out no criminal allegations. The sheriff wrote back to thank the writer
"for the info," said he would look into it and forwarded it to a top
aide with a note of "for our operation."

Latino inmates with limited English skills were punished for
failing to understand commands in English by being put in solitary confinement
for up to 23 hours a day or keeping prisoners locked down in their jail pods
for as long as 72 hours without a trip to the canteen area or making nonlegal
phone calls.

The report said some jail officers
used racial slurs for Latinos when talking among themselves and speaking to
inmates.

Detention officers refused to
accept forms requesting basic daily services and reporting mistreatment when
the documents were completed in Spanish and pressured Latinos with limited
English skills to sign forms that implicate their legal rights without language
assistance.

The agency pressures Latinos with
limited English skills to sign forms by yelling at them and keeping them in
uncomfortably cold cells for long periods of time.

The Justice Department said it
hadn't yet established a pattern of alleged wrongdoing by the sheriff's office
in the three areas where they will continue to investigation: complaints of
excessive force against Latinos, botched sex-crimes cases and immigration
efforts that have hurt the agency's trust with the Hispanic community.

Federal authorities will continue
to investigate whether the sheriff's office has limited the willingness of
witnesses and victims to report crimes or talk to Arpaio's office.

"MCSO has done almost nothing
to build such a relationship with Mariciopa County's Latino residents,"
Perez wrote.